No Lying, No Exceptions

If you use real people and real events, you don’t get to lie. No dramatic license, no aiming for a larger truth, no composite characters, no changing things around for better narrative flow, no “art.” No lying.

I get it. Actual events can happen slowly, or not at all, intermittently, inconclusively, inconveniently, and not in useful way for story-telling. I also understand that, for example, history and historians never get to the pure unvarnished objective truth of myth and legend. There are too many distortions, too many intervening years, too many people, sources, and all the grand filtration that the past goes through before reaching its reporter. I know too that historians often produce pedantic, waffle-full, carefully-couched, well meaning but utterly boring recitations. Their books fly off the shelves only when someone yanks too hard on the David McCullough biographies beside them.

All that is true, and irrelevant. Using real people with real lives and real names as your subjects gives a singular advantage over fiction: the conviction and credibility of reality. The power of talking about things as they are, rather than as you imagine, goes bone-deep with the audience. It goes too deep for disclaimers and denials and claims about artistic license to overcome. That is its great value.

The payment for that power is a duty and responsibility to your subjects, to your audience (now and future), to your peers, and to the act of explanation and narration itself, to speak the truth as you understand it, in all details big and small. There is no “larger truth” that you get to by lying. If you wish to speak the truth, you must actually speak the truth.

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47 comments

I don’t know about “No exceptions.” In Daisey’s case it seems pretty clear that his fabrications hurt his message, but giving David Foster Wallace a hard time for fictionalizing parts of his essays seems to be missing the point. If you’re approaching Wallace the same way you do with a long form piece in the Atlantic (i.e., with some sort of expectation of encountering objective truth) you’re fooling yourself. That’s not what Wallace is about, and it’s not what he’s trying to do in his writing, be it his fiction or his essays.

I see what you’re saying, silby. But there’s other types of writing which exist other than “true” writing. It exists for a reason, and it’s not all about giving the reader or theatergoer a “good story-telling experience.”

What do you say to some like Tim O’Brien who claims that the only way to tell a true war story is through fiction (in The Things They Carried). Of course, O’Brien is a fiction writer and is pretty clear about that.

But what I mean is that the “essay,” as a genre of writing with several centuries of precedent, is not one primarily about objective truth-telling. It’s more about the writer’s approach to things in the world and their own personal response to it. If you approach Wallace’s essays primarily as a way to learn about the McCain campaign or a lobster festival, you’re going to be let down. That’s not what they’re for. I’m not saying you have to like them, just to be aware that there’s not an easy way to categorize “fact” and “fiction” in writing and that for some writers that’s precisely the point.

Tom, you first argued that the expectation of truth is mistaken because of “what Wallace is about”, and now because of what “the ‘essay'” is “about”. I don’t think either line of attack works. For the first, Wallace was perfectly capable of writing to different standards in e.g. his novels and speeches, so he could have done journalism if he’d wanted. For the second, I’d say that even if the interest of an essay doesn’t lie primarily in its reporting, what reporting it does is expected to be truthful.

Vance: I guess I’m mostly objecting to the hard line Sibley has laid down here. “No Lying, No Exceptions” doesn’t work because, well, there are exceptions. I don’t really want to argue that what Wallace did was “right,” (or even that we should ignore his fabrications) but I just don’t think there’s an easy way to say he was wrong, either. Wallace could have done journalism, but he wrote literary essays instead. We just can’t judge the truthiness (…sorry…) of those essays equally against the truthiness of Daisey’s work; they’re different things with different agendas.

@eric. I don’t think Shakespeare does, no. I didn’t really talk about what the reaction should be in a case like DFW or Shakespeare, so if I were to moderate my position it is that we can recognize great art, while still criticizing its choices in production.

@Dave Oddly, I come to my position from a position of deep postmodernism.

Where is the line? Can he invent dialogue? Can he invent meetings that never took place? Can he bend someone’s morality or character to generate a plot from history?

I believe I remember Gore Vidal claiming that there is only one scene in Lincoln that is not based in some documentary evidence or other, and that is the private scene between Lincoln and Mary Todd. Are you going to say he doesn’t “get to” do this? To be honest, that doesn’t make any sense to me.

But Silbey, doesn’t such a hard line as restricting Shakespeare or Vidal basically obliterate historical fiction as a genre? Do you therefore find all historical fiction unethical?

I ask because I am actually by and large in agreement with you — if you are doing anything that even runs the risk of being labeled journalism, then no lying is the only acceptable policy in my mind. If for no other reason — and there are other reasons — that any punch your message has will be heavily depleted by opponents once they can call you a liar.

But when we look at something that is clearly fiction — a play, a historical fiction novel — why apply the same rule? Why can’t we allow our broader imaginations to posit possibilities or illuminate larger truths through the creation of events and conversations that either never took place or have their exact nature lost to history? Isn’t this exactly one of the most valuable mediums with which to meditate on the larger significance not just of history, but pretty much *anything*?

Perhaps I make the effort to ask this merely because I cannot imagine a world without Gore Vidal’s “Burr,” and because I believe in my heart — in that space of historical imagination — that no strictly historical monograph ever produced better captured what Alexander Hamilton must have actually looked, moved, and talked like; actually was about, if you will. And that’s the sentimentality of love, for you. But that’s exactly it; doesn’t this feed the empathy we have for each other based on our shared human condition more than any other format? In a weird way, it speaks to why we love history better than any history book ever could. I think that’s quite worth preserving, and the ethical or professional issues it might conjure become matters of speculation or puritanism as long as the work itself is labeled “fiction.”

I don’t think this is a tenable position. Maybe you mean, when David Lord Silbey is ruler of stage and page, then writers don’t get to do that: but for as much of literary and theatrical history as I am aware, they have got to do it.

@Robin Marie Yes, I’m not comfortable with the situation of historical fiction, either. There is perhaps room for a modification of my position that recognizes the difference between actively making no explicit truth claim (ie this work is entirely fictional, albeit with real names) and making an explicit truth claim along the lines of ‘most of this is true but with some added elements’ or ‘I’m lying a bit in service of a larger truth.’ The former would save historical fiction and the latter condemn Mike Daisey.

@eric: Did you not get my aristocratic promotion letter? Shocking, the service these days. More seriously, of course what I say is not going to have any effect on the reputations of Shakespeare, DFW, or really Daisey. “They don’t get to do it” is really “They don’t get to do it without being called on it.” Or even: “they don’t get to do it without someone having to explain which parts are a lie.”

I like that latter one best, I think. Mike Daisey now will have to spend the rest of his career having someone explain which parts of his monologues are lies and which aren’t. That strikes me as a useful punishment, and a useful distinction.

I do think there has to be a place for speculative historical fiction which fills in the gaps in the historical record. I like the approach of Alan Moore in From Hell. He freely intermingles real characters and situations with his own inventions, interpretations and speculations, but provides extensive footnotes at the back to let you know what his sources are (if any) for each scene. If memory serves, he sometimes admits that he’s chosen an interpretations that he doesn’t think are the ones most likely to be true, but which best fit his artistic intentions.

I do think there’s a question of genre labelling here. In my mind at least, there’s a clear distinction between historical fiction and journalism or biography. But I do get frustrated reading historical fiction that (with occasional exceptions) you’re never really clear which bits are made up. For example, some of the wildest stuff in James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy, which I’d assumed to be pure demented Ellroy invention, turns out to have at least one foot in historical reality (see e.g. Chuck Rogers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Rogers_(murder_suspect) ).

“… I head down to the lobby of the Mira Hotel in Kowloon, Hong Kong, and I step out
into a twenty-first century Hong Kong monsoon season night … there are
hundreds of people on every block, and there’s this humid sort of animal smell, the smell of
humans in close proximity with one another, a smell we’ve all almost entirely forgotten.”

Ahem, animal smell?

And who is the “we” here?

“And a few blocks down from the Mira Hotel in Kowloon, Hong Kong, sits the
Chungking Mansions.
The Chungking Mansions are a wretched hive of scum and villainy. ”

and here I feel the need to mention Gordon Mathews’ excellent recent _Ghetto at the Center of the World_ (Chicagoe 2011) which takes the trouble to learn about Chungking Mansions. Daisey seems intent on narrating his experience in the East as a series of horrors. Part of his own narrative is his failure to prepare, his lack of languages and background and the kind of time-consuming, boring work that goes into figuring a place out. He’s blundering into places and recording his feelings.

I agree with Silbey that once someone moves into “reporting” and away from theater or fiction writing, truth matters – essential, truthful details, not simply the “essential truth” got at by the roundabout way of making stuff up.

That said, I found it interesting that in Daisey’s piece, there may not have been guards with guns at the gates of Foxconn factories, but there are certainly serious labor issues found within China’s manufacturing base. Here’s a NY Times story that details some of those abuses: http://nyti.ms/GH0oxe.

Daisey did not personally see people who’d been affected by Hexane, but Apple factories (though not FoxConn plants) had experienced two serious explosions due to Hexane not long before. The essential truth is that the conditions are very poor in those plants – loosely regulated, flooded with low-paid workers willing to work very long hours – and that’s exactly why US companies (this is not just an Apple issue!) go there for manufacturing.

After the Daisey piece aired, Apple justified why they were in China in a recent NY Times story – US workers are not interested in working exceptionally long hours for very little money. We cannot gear up a plant immediately, as they can in China (http://nyti.ms/GMO4W0 ). We have more than a century of labor history that shows why/how we moved away from such labor practices in the US – a messy, dirty, bloody history.

Yesterday’s news cycle had stories of how Apple is working to reduce labor’s excessive hours in China – here’s one story in PCmag.com: http://bit.ly/GFgIKi

These stories popped up after the Daisey story aired. There was certainly smoke in Mr. Daisey’s visit to China, if not the fire and brimstone he gave us in the TAL story. In the end, however, his embellished truth diminished his message and his story – and his reputation.

Thanks for the link to the DFW post. This makes me want to visit some of Hemingway’s journalism, to see if he filled his news stories with embellished fiction to bolster the facts.

I think we are in a time when truth and lies are uncomfortably mingling together in too many areas – in business, in politics and in news. When the POTUS utters “16 words” that suggest Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons, the NY Times can print that as fact. And indeed, it is fact that the POTUS said those words. The lack of reporting turns PR into news, however, and leaves us vulnerable to wars started on a foundation of untruth.

It is interesting that a story in This American Life, a radio show that (to me) has always used embellished truth to polish and expose the essential truth about America, is the focus of attention in a discussion of truth in journalism. I hope the major media outlets take note: truth matters.

I like DFW, but I’m disappointed if he was making stuff up in his campaign reporting.

I mean, besides “John McCain as an admirable candidate,” which I already knew was fiction but thought DFW had convinced himself of. Maybe that part was the clue that the whole thing was fiction? Subtle!

I agree with Silbey that once someone moves into “reporting” and away from theater or fiction writing, truth matters – essential, truthful details, not simply the “essential truth” got at by the roundabout way of making stuff up.

You can agree with Silbey, or you can agree with that proposition, but not both.

William Shakespeare gets to lie all he wants in Julius Caesar and Henry V, doesn’t he?

To go back to this: why is it a problem to criticize Shakespeare for making up details? As you noted, I ain’t Lord High Panjandrum of Literary Decisions, so my criticism has no practical effect. But even if I was, I’m not sure I see the problem in saying that Shakespeare wrote great plays, but made up details to do it, and that makes me uncomfortable when the subjects were real people. How is that a different critique than saying that Titus Andronicus is a great play but there’s more violence in it than in several of the Saw movies?

This may be a dead horse, but Shakespeare’s audiences then and now surely understood they were watching a drama not an historical re-enactment. Look at the way Richard III keeps chatting up the audience.

Yes, sure, you can voice any number of idiosyncratic discomforts with stuff (what are blogs for?), but it dilutes the moral force of your critique of Daisey to include Shakespeare in the same group … in fact it matches the kind of moral blurring that Daisey is tryng to do now. I would prefer not to reduce your criticism of Daisey to an idiosyncratic discomfort.

Main Street Muse: I know I’m picking nits (but I’m a chemist so I’ve got to set the record straight), but the problem with hexane is that it’s a neurotoxin that was being used in unsafe conditions. It is flammable, but it was aluminum dust that caused explosions at Apple suppliers.

David, I don’t think there’s any problem with pointing out historical inaccuracies in Richard III; I’m concerned about the phrasing “you don’t get to” do it. That sounds like a prohibition on all historical fiction.

Also, if your critique of historical fiction is simply that it has fiction in it, I don’t think that’s much of a critique. You sound a bit like a bluenose Puritan railing that all fiction is lies. Yes; so? Labeling it fiction traditionally renders such lies socially acceptable if not salutary.

ODM – yes you are right. There are two different safety issues with Apple suppliers in China. Here’s the quote from the NY Times article:

“Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.”

Then what’s the point of fiction if not to explore truths that can’t be explained by fact? That’s what O’Brien and Shakespeare and other fiction writers (clearly labelled as such) are getting at, no? Fiction is about emotional truth because emotions ain’t nothing but lies we tell ourselves.

@Eric, to clarify, I don’t think that getting at the essential truth via made-up/fictional details is good journalism.

I also do not think Shakespeare was offering up journalism on stage. The medium of choice provides different ways to relay a particular message.

The Social Network film is not necessarily true in every detail – Mark Zuckerberg feels they got the wardrobe right, though much else he deems wrong – but despite historical inaccuracies, it’s a great piece of filmmaking – a great narrative about the people who developed a new way to communicate, and the new business model needed to finance such innovation. Had it claimed to be a documentary, the inaccuracies would have diminished the piece. As a feature film (not documentary), the filmmakers have more leeway – hiring actors to play real people makes it understood at a basic level that this is fictionalized to some degree.

With Citizen Kane, Orson Welles took a different approach by creating a fictionalized Kane to portray Wm Randolph Hearst – and he fuzzed the details of Hearst’s life by blending in details from other larger-than-life capitalists like Sam Insull.

In the end, the Daisey piece reflected a truth large enough to provoke Apple to at least give the appearance of changing certain business practices in Asia. But Daisey/TAL could have had the same impact by using the true, factual details.

Yes, sure, you can voice any number of idiosyncratic discomforts with stuff (what are blogs for?), but it dilutes the moral force of your critique of Daisey to include Shakespeare in the same group

I think the opposite; that it strengthens the moral critique. Allowing exemptions for Shakespeare because he’s Shakespeare then gets us into an argument about who else gets exemptions, how close to Shakespeare you have to be for lying not to count, and we end up arguing about whether Daisey gets to do his schtick in a theater versus on This American Life.

I don’t think there’s any problem with pointing out historical inaccuracies in Richard III; I’m concerned about the phrasing “you don’t get to” do it. That sounds like a prohibition on all historical fiction.

I think you’re over-reading that phrase, especially as I clarified it:

Also, if your critique of historical fiction is simply that it has fiction in it, I don’t think that’s much of a critique. You sound a bit like a bluenose Puritan railing that all fiction is lies. Yes; so? Labeling it fiction traditionally renders such lies socially acceptable if not salutary.

But I’m not discussing all fiction, I’m discussing “historical fiction.” We should be careful not to elide the two (I’m looking at you, too, Western Dave). Historical fiction, by its very name, makes a different claim: that it is, in some sense, about the actual past. That, I think, raises the bar on what is problematic and what is not.

Again, as I said to Robin Marie, I’m not comfortable that historical fiction has gotten pulled into the Daisey side of the equation by my formulation, and that revised version that I put out above is looking more appealing.

Historical fiction, by its very name, makes a different claim: that it is, in some sense, about the actual past.

Except it doesn’t. Note that the full title of Vidal’s Lincoln is Lincoln: A Novel. Even without that obvious qualification, it’s sold and marketed as fiction. We know it’s not an attempt to represent, even imperfectly, the past as a historian would. (Though it is an attempt to represent the past as a novelist would – with evidence and extrapolation …)

So if your position now is,

There is perhaps room for a modification of my position that recognizes the difference between actively making no explicit truth claim (ie this work is entirely fictional, albeit with real names) and making an explicit truth claim along the lines of ‘most of this is true but with some added elements’ or ‘I’m lying a bit in service of a larger truth.’

Then I think you’re off to a good start, because you’re letting Vidal and Shakespeare and the rest of the historical fictioneers (yes, myself included) go.

But I still think it’s only a start. Your man Daisey gets up in a theater, does a monologue; do we think it represents the same way of getting at the truth as a reporter standing up on the evening news? I don’t think we do, or should – unless Daisey tells us it does. And to cut to the chase, I think that’s where he went bad – by saying, I’m telling you the truth in a way the journalists won’t; listen to me, not them. That was a lie. The journalists were telling the truth, and he wasn’t, and he was wrong at that moment – early in the theatrical run – to try to represent what he was doing as an acceptable substitute for journalism.

Except it doesn’t. Note that the full title of Vidal’s Lincoln is Lincoln: A Novel. Even without that obvious qualification, it’s sold and marketed as fiction.

I don’t think a work has to label itself historical fiction to be considered such.

Then I think you’re off to a good start, because you’re letting Vidal and Shakespeare and the rest of the historical fictioneers (yes, myself included) go.

Eh. It’s a potential modification of my position, but I’m not quite off my original statement yet.

I don’t think we do, or should – unless Daisey tells us it does. And to cut to the chase, I think that’s where he went bad – by saying, I’m telling you the truth in a way the journalists won’t; listen to me, not them.

The problem with that is that by using actual people & events, people like Daisey can get away with implying that what they’re telling is the truth without coming out and saying it. It also doesn’t deal with either the argument about lying to get to a larger truth, and it doesn’t really deal with the audience trying to figure out what is true and what isn’t.

Similarly, the title is “The Tragedy of King Richard the Third.” No, I am *not* talking about exempting “Shakespeare because he’s Shakespeare” — that would be pretty silly! If it really is a moral error to take historical material and turn it into fiction, then WS should be criticized along with the rest. But it’s not.

The point I and I think Eric are making is that writers or historical fiction or drama are playing a different game, writing a different genre. The Iliad, Books of Samuel, Cantar de Mio Cid all take historical material and shape it dramatically, no? To put them in the same category as Daisey’s monologue is mistaken not because of the difference in artistic quality, but because they’re up to something different.

If you look at his monologue, Daisey is making explicit claims to his own witnessing that are lies. He told further lies to NPR producers to conceal those lies. I haven’t read the whole transcript, but Daisey’s theme seems to be that he’s a bumbling everyman, without expertise, who goes to see for himself and tells you what he found. And of course the most dramatic details turn out to be the most made up. As I suggested upthread, the genre convention here is the orientalist traveler’s narrative, in which the western traveler goes to the east, encounters the lurid and unspeakable, and records her/his disgust.

One more example, more to muse than to make any point. Half way through Hunter Thompson’s book about the 1972 Presidential campaign, many years ago, I remember wondering if some of it might actually be true. That is, I was used to the fictionalized HST persona from _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_ and the campaign book seemed like more of the same. I never did figure that out.

Dave, that’s not a particularly useful comment. As a matter of fact, I love historical fiction, especially C.S. Forester, other Napoleonic War fiction, World War II stuff, and so on. I’ve read Eric’s novel in both manuscript and printed form and think it’s quite awesome, and that it has perhaps the best title ever.

@Colin: I understand what your and Eric’s points are. I just don’t agree with them.

@Eric: As long as a google search on my name doesn’t come up with same results that one on Santorum’s does…